The general objectives of the proposed project are to develop a basic technology for investigating marital communication in the laboratory, and to study the reliability and validity of two relatively new laboratory instruments. The Inventory of Marital Conflicts is a dyadic interaction task developed at NIMH to elicit disagreement between discussants. The Marital Interaction Coding System was developed at the University of Oregon to allow trained observers to decode from videotape, couples' behavioral patterns of social reinforcement and problem solving. These two instruments will be used in conjunction to investigate distressed and nonistressed couples' patterns of maital communication. One specific objective is to determine whether marital communication about hypothetical (IMC) problems is representative of interaction exhibited during couples' discussion of their own real problems. A second objective is to investigate and define certain patterns of destructive and constructive martial interaction. Samples of distressed and nondistressed married couples will fill out a variety of variety of martial inventories and solve real and hypothetical provlems under videotape observation in the laboratory. It is predicted that degree of marital distress will correlate with hypothesized destructive patterns of behavior reported by couples in their home environments and with those independently observed in the laboratory.